An Accidental Hero (9 page)

Maybe.

He knew this: He had to
try.

“I
promise to tell you everything,” Cammi said, “the minute we get home.”

By the time Lamont had arrived at the hospital the day before, she’d been sleeping comfortably, thanks to the mild sedative the nurse had given her. She’d given the hospital staff strict instructions not to reveal anything to her father about her condition so Lamont had no choice but to go home and wait till this morning to find out why she’d been hospitalized.

Lamont’s brow furrowed, a sure sign his patience was wearing thin. “You think I can’t handle some ugly news?” He tossed the plastic bag he’d been carrying onto her tray table.

“It’s not about what you can handle, Dad, it’s—”

He took his hat from the foot of her bed and, holding it by the brim, spun it round and round like a disconnected steering wheel. “It’s no secret that hospitals give me the heebie-jeebies.”

True enough. He’d gone through a mighty rough spell after Rose’s death. While he holed up in his den with a bottle of whiskey, Cammi took charge. She started by gathering the ranch hands to explain that they hadn’t been paid because her dad was “under the weather.” Handing the foreman the ranch checkbook, she instructed him to do what her father would…until Lamont was ready to do it himself.

She’d helped her mother enough to know how everything else should be done. And so she did it, from packing lunches and readying her sisters to catch the school bus, to monitoring their homework. It had been her fault, after all, that Rose had been out that night in the first place; if Cammi hadn’t needed a new dress to wear for her solo in the Harvest Days show at her school, Rose would have been home, safe and sound, that terrible, rainy night.

So Cammi didn’t complain when her friends went to the mall or to the movies on weekends while she cleaned, did laundry, cooked suppers that could be frozen and heated in the oven on weeknights. Nothing pleased her more than when she was able to coax her bleary-eyed father to eat a few bites of something healthy every evening. Because if it hadn’t been for her silly girlish vanity, if she’d been satisfied wearing one of the dozens of dresses already in her closet, he’d still have had his beloved Rose.

When the food supply ran low, Cammi scoured the house for loose change and dollar bills and, stash in hand, phoned Rose’s best friend. Nadine did more than deliver staples that day; she sat Lamont down and reminded him what Rose would have expected of him. From that day forward, he’d done his duty—and
then some. But his aversion to hospitals hadn’t changed one whit. Cammi could use a bit of Nadine’s commonsense wisdom right about now.

“If something is wrong with you, I want to hear about it,” Lamont said, sliding a forefinger round and round under his suede hatband.

“There’s nothing wrong with me….” She hoped and prayed that was true, because someday, she wanted a houseful of children.

“Person doesn’t wind up in a place like this if nothing’s wrong.”

“I know, I know. And I promise to tell you everything once we’re home. For now, let’s just say it’s nothing serious. Okay?”

Lamont sat the hat on the foot of her bed again. “Let’s have a look at you….” He lifted her chin on a bent forefinger. Grinning, he said, “Good golly, Miss Molly. You look like something the dog drug in.”

“Then, it’s a good thing I’m not thinking of entering the Miss Texas pageant, eh?”

“Hogwash. You’d win, hands down, even after…” He paused. “…after whatever put you in this rotten place.”

He handed her the plastic bag. “Thought you might need a change of clothes. Hope I did okay, putting an outfit together.”

Cammi peeked inside, where a neatly folded sweatsuit lay nestled on her underthings. She had a hard time blinking back tears of gratitude. “It’s perfect,” she told him, climbing out of bed.

Lamont nodded. “I’ll just wait in the hall while
you get out of that foul thing they call a hospital gown.”

“So you can be closer to the main entrance?”

He grinned slightly. “Main
exit
is more like it.”

Despite every effort to stay awake during the half-hour drive back to River Valley, Cammi dozed off half a dozen times. Finally, though, the magnificent ranch house appeared on the horizon.

“Home never looked better,” she said, mostly to herself.

He parked the truck out front, and asked as he unlocked the front door, “So what’ll you have, coffee or tea?”

One of the nurses had said dehydration went hand in hand with hemorrhaging. “Nice tall glass of water would be great. The air is so dry in that place.”

Closing the door behind them, Lamont threw his keys into the burled wooden bowl on the foyer table. Hands on her shoulders, he inspected her face. “You’re lookin’ mighty pale. Head on into the den and put your feet up. I’ll be in soon as I fetch our drinks.” He turned her around, gave her a gentle shove toward the doorway.

Cammi started forward, then changed her mind. What she was about to tell him would break his heart, would become one more item on his long “Ways Cammi Has Disappointed Me” list. She might not get a chance to tell him, once the truth was out, how dear he was to her, how very hard she’d been trying these past few months to live in a way that would make him proud, to make up for being the reason Rose was out that night.

She spun on her heels and threw her arms around him. “I love you, Dad. So much that sometimes—”

He kissed the top of her head. “And I love you, too, sweetie, more than words could ever say.” Tilting his head back, he gave her another once-over. “Now get on in there,” he said, tousling her hair, “and sit down before you fall down.”

Nodding, Cammi did as she was told, choosing the end of the deep blue leather couch nearest his favorite chair. Feet resting on the glass-topped coffee table, and huddled under a fringed afghan, she closed her eyes. She didn’t know how much time had passed before Lamont walked into the room, carrying a steaming mug of coffee for himself and a glass of ice water for her.

He put the mug on his end table, handed her the tumbler. “You sure you’re up to this?” he asked. The black leather of his recliner squeaked in protest as he settled his bulk onto its ample seat. “We can put off…whatever…until later.”

Nodding, she sipped the water. The old mantel clock above the fireplace ticked off the seconds as Lamont rested a booted ankle on his knee. Fingers drumming on the chair’s worn armrest, he heaved a sigh.

Cammi sat up straighter, put the glass on a soap-stone coaster beside the sofa. “There’s really no way to ease into this.”

Fingers steepled under his chin, Lamont nodded. “Just start at the beginning, sweetie.”

She could see by the tired expression on his face that he’d prepared himself for the worst. True to form, she wouldn’t disappoint him. And wasn’t
that
a bitter
irony, she thought; in every way imaginable, she’d let him down, time and time again, but this time…

Clearing her throat, she did as he suggested and started at the beginning, explaining how she’d met Rusty on a movie set. “I’d been hired to play an extra,” she said, “and he was a stuntman.” She told Lamont how it had been love at first sight—or so she’d thought; how much they seemed to have in common; how much fun they’d had together. “He wasn’t a Christian,” she continued, “and I knew you wouldn’t like that. So I decided to work hard, to pray hard, and when he accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior,
then
I’d tell you about him and…everything.”

Cammi slid past the buying of the marriage license, the ceremony, the honeymoon. It wasn’t like Lamont to sit there so quietly. Since Cammi didn’t know what to make of it, she plunged on.

“Didn’t take long to figure out he’d hardened his heart to the Word.” She began fiddling with the afghan’s fringe, nervously wrapping it first around one finger, then another. “Then, there were rumors….” She had to stop for a moment, because remembering how humiliating, it had been to hear about Rusty’s secret life threatened her precarious hold on self-control. “Turned out they weren’t rumors, after all.”

She took another sip of water, hoping Lamont wouldn’t recognize it as a stall tactic, nothing more. “He’d been gone four straight nights when…when a policeman woke me at three in the morning. He drove me to the morgue, where they showed me…”

Cammi ran both hands through her hair. “He’d crashed his convertible into a tree, impaling himself on the steering column…and injuring his…date.”

Lamont’s eyebrows lifted as his hands gripped the chair’s armrest. “His
date?
”

Cammi nodded. “Weird, huh? Some people think it’s perfectly acceptable to have a wife
and
a girlfriend.”

Lamont sat on the edge of his chair, elbows resting on his knees. He clasped his hands together and said, “Something tells me there’s more….”

“Yes,” she whispered, “there’s more.”
Just say it,
she thought. “Later that same day, my doctor called to say—” Cammi met her father’s eyes “—to say I was pregnant.”

He hung his head. “I sorta thought that’s what you’d say.”

He stared at the floor and didn’t speak for what seemed to Cammi like an hour. Then he got to his feet and sat beside her on the couch.

“C’mere,” Lamont said, drawing her into a hug.

The floodgates opened, releasing all the misery and sadness, all the regret and recrimination she’d been bottling up since that horrible day. It surprised her, when she’d cried it all out, to see tears in her father’s eyes, too.

“I’m so sorry, Dad. I hate being such a disappointment to—”

He laid a finger over her lips to silence her. “Shh,” he said. “Don’t talk that way. You’ve never been anything but a joy.” Holding her at arm’s length, he gave her a gentle shake. “You’re the spittin’ image of your mama, and I’d love you for that alone. God forgive me for saying it, but you’re twice the woman she was, twice as smart, twice as thoughtful.”

Using the pads of his thumbs, he dried her tears.
“Do you know what she was doing the night she died?”

Cammi nodded. “Shopping for a new dress for me.”

“She forgot your dress, darlin’. That was her excuse when she left here that night, but it wasn’t in the car after—” He took a deep breath. “I told her not to go out in that weather, but would she listen?
No-o-o.
‘There’s a sale at Gizmo’s,’ she said. ‘If I wait till tomorrow, I’ll miss all the latest styles!’ she said.”

He sat back, pulled Cammi with him. “The cops gave me everything they found in her car—cassette tapes, keys, her purse…and four dress boxes from Gizmo’s.” He held her at arm’s length to add, “Did Gizmo’s ever sell girls’ clothes?”

Cammi shook her head.

“I’ve been telling you for years the accident wasn’t your fault. If I’d known
why
you blamed yourself…” Lamont ran a hand through his hair. “Maybe if I’d been a better father, I would have asked.”

“Dad, you—”

“You didn’t hold it against me, did you?”

“Hold what against you? You’ve been the best father a girl could ask for!”

“Y’know,” he said, kissing her temple, “I believe you mean that. Which is just one of a thousand reasons I love you like I do. You never gave it a thought, did you, that if I hadn’t been so wrapped up in my own self-pity, I might have asked—”

“Dad, really. Stop saying things like—”

“And look at you now, not an hour out of the hospital and trying to excuse my bad behavior. You’re
something else, you know that? You’d never put your life at risk for something so trivial as a sale on dresses, and the proof is the way you handled things after your mama’s funeral.”

She remembered only too well that at first, he’d held it together. It was later, after the friends stopped dropping by and the in-laws stopped calling, when the casserole dishes had been reclaimed and the flowers had all dried up, that he’d let grief and despair claim him….

“If she’d died for any other reason, I could have handled it. It would’ve hurt like mad, but…
dresses?
Pretty clothes were more important to her than staying safe for her family?” He gave Cammi another gentle shake. “Don’t you see, sweetie? I’ll love her till the day I die, but I can’t forgive her for making you girls motherless, for making me a widower. I’ve never been disappointed in you—it’s
her
I’m disappointed in!” One last shake before he let her go. “And let’s not forget that if you hadn’t stepped in, run things while I was havin’ myself a pity party, we might’ve lost everything. You saved our bacon, Camelia.”

Cammi tried to take it all in.

“Well,” Lamont said on a heavy sigh, “at least it’s all out in the open now.”

“No, not all of it, Dad. There’s one more thing….”

“I know. You lost the baby.”

His voice was flat, unemotional, when he said it, as if he couldn’t bear to say it any other way.

She felt the tears begin to well up again. Unable to trust herself to speak, Cammi nodded. When she found her voice, she said, “I didn’t love Rusty, not the way a wife should love her husband, but I wanted
this baby. Wanted it very much.” The reasons poured out even faster than her tears—how the child had turned her from a dreamy-eyed girl to a feet-on-the-ground woman, how she’d made solid, rational decisions for the first time in her life for no reason other than that she
had
to behave responsibly from now on, for the baby’s sake.

She didn’t tell her father about the handsome cowboy she’d met, who’d been her hero in every sense of the word, who’d somehow managed to steal her heart in just a few days. Admitting she was falling in love with him, already, was the same as admitting every other good thing she’d done lately had been a mistake. Besides, there didn’t seem to be much point in telling him about Reid, because what chance did she have for a future with the man who she suspected had been driving the other car that night!

“You’ve been making responsible decisions since you were twelve, sweetie. And you’ll go right on making them. God has blessed you with—”

Cammi didn’t hear anything after
God.
Anger deafened her, rage blinded her. She was suddenly keenly aware that God had let her down, big time. She’d done it all by the book, right down to keeping her promise to remain a virgin until her wedding night…and in a city like Hollywood, no less! She’d started every day with a devotional, ended each by reading His Word. It hadn’t been easy, what with her wacky waitress schedule, but she’d found a church and hadn’t missed a single Sunday service. Despite the ugly rumors that surfaced after Rusty’s death, she hadn’t given in to the temptation to hate him. Rather, she’d decided early on to tell the baby nothing but
good things about its daddy. She’d never asked the Almighty for anything but the strength to do His Will, and yet He’d taken the baby. He’d—